Unsaid: A Novel (4 page)

But it was more than just the money. The job gave David another family—one that could never be taken from him because it lived on and in the insulated world of facts, legal reasoning, and case law. This family helped make up for the history of his profound aloneness and, frankly, took some of the weight off my own shoulders.

So, was I disappointed? No. I just wanted a little more for David, not from him. I wanted him to relax more, to enjoy his life more, to revel in our animals, their antics and little idiosyncrasies, more. I wanted David to feel connected and be in the moment when he was with us instead of distracted by what he’d just left or where he needed to go next. I wanted David to realize that he had succeeded in the practice of law, had mastered the craft of being a lawyer, and now needed to learn the much more difficult craft of creating and living a full life.

I guess I really just wanted him to value what I was able to contribute to our relationship.

I wanted.

Perhaps David’s feeling that he disappointed me is understandable after all. Letting someone you love know that you want more for them probably does go into the ear at the same pitch as disappointment.

When David returns to the front hallway of our house, the three dogs are waiting. David walks past them, but they don’t follow him this time and instead continue to stare expectantly at the door. It is disturbing to see the recognition that finally crosses David’s face.

“It’s just me,” he says to the dogs. “I’m sorry, but it’s now always going to be just me.”

The two big dogs eventually give up and move elsewhere. Only my Skippy retains his vigil for me by the front door.

T
he most forceful evidence of the lasting significance of Dr. Jane Cassidy’s work to my life is how easily I can find her again in death. I can’t seem to see the friends who supported me in my illness or relatives who sent me on my way with grieving good-byes, but whenever I’m not with David or my animals, Jane Cassidy (“Jaycee” to me), Cindy, and the Center for Advanced Primate Studies (known as CAPS) swirl into focus before me. Of course I cannot rule out the possibility that I’m actually only observing false images manufactured by a decomposing brain, but I would hope that the universe isn’t that cruel.

Jaycee and I share a painful history. In our final year at Cornell, we became research associates for Dr. Renee Vartag, considered by many (including herself) to be one of the more brilliant minds of her generation in the field of primate immunology.

Our work for Vartag involved caring for a long-term test subject—a bonobo or pygmy chimpanzee named Charlie. Charlie had been born in captivity and was four years old when we met him.
Bonobos, like their chimpanzee relatives, are commonly used in immunological research because their immune systems are nearly identical to those of humans. At the time, that was the full extent of my knowledge of chimpanzees, pygmy or otherwise. Unfortunately, I soon learned more.

Charlie lived in a twenty-by-twenty indoor/outdoor enclosure that had been built to Vartag’s specifications. Vartag had given us only a few responsibilities for him. We fed him, made sure he always had fresh water, cleaned him, and gave him (as specified in one of Vartag’s many terse memos to us) “no less than sixty minutes of human interaction a day.”

We also were required to give Charlie his “supplements”—a carefully measured cocktail of natural and synthetic vitamins and nutrients that we added to his food. According to Vartag, Charlie had been receiving his supplements since he was two and they were specifically designed to improve his immune system against disease or infection. We collected urine and fecal samples every day and sent them to the lab for analysis, presumably to measure the results of Vartag’s hypothesis.

Although Jaycee and I were only obligated to spend a daily hour with Charlie, that quickly became a meaningless guideline. Charlie was a remarkable creature—curious, playful, intelligent, and very aware. If you’ve never looked into the face of a chimpanzee up close, you simply cannot imagine how human-like and expressive they can be. But it was Charlie’s hands, not his face, that I remember most; they were not only incredibly dexterous, but also soft and warm and vulnerable, like a child’s hands. I soon found that I was spending whatever free time I had with Charlie in his enclosure. When he saw me arrive each day, he would point at me and his face would light up.

Whenever I went to visit Charlie, Jaycee was already there. If I was smitten with Charlie, Jaycee was singularly absorbed by him. When I was with the two of them, I sometimes felt like I was the third wheel eavesdropping on a jealously guarded love affair.

Three months into our relationship with Charlie, we received in our mailboxes a new memo from Vartag decreeing that the oral supplements would stop and injections would begin.

Vartag assured us that the shots were merely a potent combination of vitamins B
₁₂
and C—harmless. She also told us that we were only required to give one shot to Charlie every other day. Finally, she told us that if we were not prepared to follow her harmless protocol, then we didn’t get to keep our jobs. It was that simple—“No shots, no Charlie.”

I could walk away from the money without any qualms, but abandon Charlie? We convinced ourselves that if we didn’t do it, someone who cared less about Charlie would take over and hurt him. As far as we know, rationalization is a uniquely human defense mechanism. I was lathered in it.

Pygmy chimpanzees actually are not much smaller than regular chimpanzees, and they are about as powerful. If Charlie had fought us on the shots, we never would have been able to administer the supplements without anesthetizing him. But Charlie trusted us by now, as Dr. Vartag clearly understood. She counted on that trust.

I remember so clearly the look of hurt and betrayal on Charlie’s face when I first jabbed him with a needle. Instead of a source of play and joy, I had suddenly and unexpectedly become an instrument of sting and fright. It was just a quick shot, and probably didn’t even hurt that much, but I swear he never looked at me the same way. Although a few treats and toys seemed to placate Charlie and
we moved on to happier things, I never again saw that look of unfettered vulnerability in his eyes. The guarded gaze that replaced it grew only more distant as the shots continued.

We tricked, cajoled, and sometimes begged Charlie in order to give him his shots, but toward the end he simply submitted to the puncture by extending his arm and looking away. Seeing this exercise in learned helplessness was the worst of all for me by many orders of magnitude.

In my work with Charlie, I had ignored one important aspect about the field of immunology—the most important aspect, actually. How do you really test the strength of an immune system? You try to make someone sick.

When Charlie’s lab tests evidenced the correct number of T-cells, proteins, prions, or whatever marker Vartag was looking for, she injected him with blood contaminated with hepatitis C. We didn’t know.

The diarrhea hit Charlie first and hard, then the bouts of vomiting, refusals to eat, lethargy, and the bone-racking fevers. Before my eyes in a matter of days, Charlie went from an animated bundle of activity to the type of being you would expect to see in late-term hospice care.

And still the supplement shots continued. Now, however, Charlie was more apt to turn away from me when he saw me and offer me his thigh or behind for the injection. More and more often, when the shot was over, Charlie would not turn to face me. Even Jaycee was unable to get him to rise. She spent hours just stroking his fur.

Charlie knew something was different, that he felt ill, but he had no sense of causality. The why of it was beyond his comprehension, except that it had something to do with our appearance in his life. One day he chased a ball, and the next day he couldn’t.
In the world of Charlie’s narrow radar screen, only one thing had changed—us. And he was right.

When we learned about the contaminated blood, Vartag was amused by our outrage. “Did you think you were going to spend your careers curing puppies of parasites and mending butterfly wings, ladies?” she challenged.

I called her unprofessional. Jaycee called her a number of other things.

Our reward for confronting this international legend in immunology was swift and decisive—she summarily fired us.

We pled our case to anyone at the school who would listen—the dean, the president, the provost, the university’s Animal Care and Use Committee. At this point, we didn’t care about the job or the money. We just wanted to nurse Charlie, or at least to be there for him as he died. Everyone nodded politely as we told our story, took notes, assured us that they would look into it, and promptly did nothing.

The only faculty member who at least recognized that we had been used and that Vartag’s conduct was inappropriate was my faculty adviser, Dr. Joshua Marks. He tried to intervene, but Vartag was too powerful. I never saw Charlie again.

I told David this precise version of the events surrounding Charlie’s death on that very first night we met in Ithaca after we returned from the hospital. I’ve repeated this version in my own mind a hundred times since. If only repetition could make it true, then perhaps I wouldn’t be locked in this colorless expanse, deafened by echoes of doubt and desire as they bang against the emptiness of my future. Only Jaycee knows the truth, and at this point she has no reason to tell.

After Charlie, Jaycee and I went in very different directions. I
wanted nothing more to do with primates—not ever. Jaycee, however, wanted to understand Charlie and what she felt had existed between them. Her work and her passion concentrated on one issue—whether the great apes possess the heretofore uniquely human state of mind we call consciousness.

I don’t believe in coincidence. So when, a few days following my initial diagnosis, I happened to open up the Cornell vet school alumni magazine (a magazine I generally make it a point not to read) and saw an article on Jaycee and her work on primate sentience, I knew I needed to call her.

Jaycee’s quest had led her through a number of areas of study—zoology, psychology, biological anthropology, and applied linguistics. She had never stopped learning. When I found her, she was working on a four-year grant at CAPS. She immediately invited me to witness her work firsthand at the CAPS campus.

The campus sits on twenty beautiful wooded acres north of Manhattan on the Hudson River. Once I arrived on that first visit, I found it difficult to leave. I visited her a dozen times thereafter, until my body made the trip impossible.

Jaycee’s work was compelling. I learned more from her in that final year about the complex relationship between the human and non-human mind than I had in all five years of vet school and subsequent small-animal medicine practice combined. Jaycee had crossed a significant barrier between “us” and “them,” and I quickly came to believe that my voracious desire for overdue answers could only be satisfied on the other side of that barrier.

You need to understand that CAPS was designed to be a “showpiece” facility for “non-invasive primate study.” In fact, CAPS doesn’t even have a surgery suite. Instead, most of the primates (rhesus monkeys, macaques, baboons, bonobos, and chimpanzees)
are generally permitted to live in social colonies, largely unaware that they are the subjects of study in the fields of psychology, sociology, and anthropology.

CAPS is the kind of place that its parent body, the National Institutes of Science, can invite congressmen to tour as an example of its progressive dedication to “humane research techniques” whenever one of the other twenty “invasive” NIS primate study facilities gets into hot water for doing things like infecting chimpanzees with hepatitis or failing to provide post-surgical pain management. In short, although the facility could never duplicate how the primates would have lived in nature, if you are a captive primate in the employ of the federal government, CAPS is the place where you want to do your time.

Because CAPS is a well-financed facility with little controversy associated with it, it also is able to attract some preeminent primate researchers, like Jaycee. These researchers obtain the ability to do very advanced work on the government’s nickel. NIS in turn obtains the right to tout these big names with their important-sounding studies when they go to Congress for their annual budget appropriation. Generally, it all works as long as everyone does what they’re paid to do and they keep their mouths shut.

It is impossible for me to think of Jaycee now without also seeing Cindy, a seventy-five-pound chimpanzee who has lived at CAPS since her birth in captivity four years ago. CAPS is the only home that Cindy knows, and Jaycee is the only mother Cindy has ever had.

Jaycee’s research lab, a large room filled with digital video cameras, flat-screen monitors, and computers, occupies the first floor of one of the buildings on the CAPS grounds. The middle of the lab is dominated by a twelve-foot-by-twelve-foot steel-and-Plexiglas enclosure—half cage, half fishbowl—that Jaycee calls the Cube.

I’m able to see the lab quite clearly now. Although the Cube door is wide open, Cindy sits patiently in the structure and shows no interest in jumping out. A large keyboard is anchored to the interior of the Cube for Cindy’s use. A mirror runs one entire wall of the enclosure, and Cindy has one eye on her reflection as she moves about.

The keyboard in the Cube is unlike anything you have in your home. The keys are quite large, but not alphanumeric. Instead, each key is marked with a symbol or a series of symbols.

Cindy wears black gloves on her hands; these are wired to a small electronic box belted to her large bicep. The big LED screen that hangs on the front of the Cube and the digital camera that has been directed at its opening complete the gadget-rich environment.

Jaycee sits just outside the door to the Cube at a computer console. Although her keyboard is normal size, the symbols on the board match those on the board in the Cube.

Jaycee designed Cindy’s project to determine the depth of human communication skills that a captive-born chimpanzee could develop if the primate was completely acculturated in human language from birth. While you can disagree with the merit of doing so, you can’t dispute the fact that human language has always been a scientific benchmark for sentience; the presumption—correct or not—has always been that those who can effectively communicate with us necessarily are self-aware and think like us. With that premise as her foundation, Jaycee finally chose the science of interspecies communication as the instrument to prove her theory that not only did certain primates possess this Holy Grail of mental states called consciousness, but primate consciousness is pretty damn near to our own.